November 8th, 2016, 12:45am by Sam Wang

Here are the final snapshots. Four Senate races are within one percentage point: Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, and North Carolina. Partisans there may want to lawyer up for possible recount battles.

Soon I’ll put out a brief Geek’s Guide to the Election. Also, live blogging starting around 8:00 pm.

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President: Hillary Clinton (D).

The Presidential estimates are based on the current snapshot in the right sidebar, except for the most-probable-single-outcome map, where variance minimization was done to give a more stable snapshot for North Carolina, Clinton +1.0 ± 1.0% (N=8 polls).

Most probable single outcome (shown on map below): Clinton 323 EV, Trump 215 EV. This is also the mode of the NC-adjusted histogram.

169 Comments so far ↓

This election would have been a Democratic Landslide if it were not for the first time in the history of all elections your media networks all selling out to ratings! From the first day of his announcing at Trump Plaza with paid actors as supporters (when has that ever happened) he has been covered with “free” air time. as a PR campaign pumping life into every ultra angry voter not able to focus on anything else, like facts! A circus, covered every night, to the detriment of ‘Fit candidates and journalistic integrity that used to provide facts for the most informed decision the voter can make!

You are a class act all around. I enjoy the wry tone of your posts and your refusal to heavily criticize other data analytics. We need more cool heads like you sir. I have enjoyed both you and Silver’s site as an attempt to apply rigorous analysis to a deeply emotional situation.

Alas, it seems the “rigorous analysis” has failed. Nate Silver’s model was more true, in that his acknowledged the uncertainty in the polls. Tomorrow Dr. Wang will engage in much verbal and statistical gymnastics to explain why he was wrong. But it is a bitter thing for those who relied upon his knowledge and skills. He is not to blame for our misplaced faith, of course. I hope he and the other polling aggregators learn humility from this experience. A Trump presidency will teach all of us many such lessons– if we survive it.

Dr Wang, you have been my rational safe harbor during the last year and a half. The work you do is important and very impressive. It helped inform me and shape where I sent my support. I will see you all too soon for 2018, ugh.

Based on the map, Dems win 14 states with 10+ electorial votes to 7 states for the Repubs. Kind of tells it all. The problem for Dems in the House is it is easy for Rs to gerymander because of the big cities. They rip off pieces from the cities to make districts. SCOTUS could stop that and may in the next 2 years.

I think of the challenges to pollsters going forward is going to be trying to factor in externalities into the data. My father worked in surgery research for 30 years. When he started in the ’70s, a response rate of 80% was considered adequate. How it’s a bout a tenth of that. The increase in cell phone only households has increased by a staggering Volume just in the last 8-10 years. At this point if I was weighting polls, I doubt I would use any information more than 20 years old, and I would also probably try to factor in demographics more aggressively when weighting polls.

Dr. Wang, I appreciate your steady, stable and classy demeanor during this whole election. Thank you for giving me a place to go to that is sane when it comes to politics. You do wonders for the psyche!

Every election the Democrats win I get post-election e-mail from a cousin that shows that the land area of districts won by the Republicans vastly exceeds the land area of districts won by Democrats, as if land, and not people, voted.

discussed a bit below and other posts. Short answer: the PEC prediction does not use the histogram to make predictions. Just “what’s the odds that MM>0 on election day” where the MM is calculated only using the median of the histogram. Doesn’t change things much this election, but maybe something to think about in the future.

Has anyone else noted the fixed periodicity in the MM plot and those of other poll watchers like the Upshot? Peak-to-peak seems to be a little less than 2 months. Strange because the state plots (Upshot for instance) do not readily show this feature. But the national plot is a convolution of the state plots, so this is some emergent behavior.

Does anyone have FFT code? Be curious to see if this is telling us something.

Not FFT but i have some SAS code i can dig up that is set up to evaluate seasonality; actually it was borrowed from this site by Ed Stanek:http://www.umass.edu/seasons/pdffiles/sea05d01.pdf
we converted the dates to Julian dates, obtaining the thetas in radians, getting the sin/cos of the radian measures, but it was really this guy’s SAS code.

from Wired article–
Because Wang has sailed True North all along, while Silver has been cautiously trying to tack his FiveThirtyEight data sailboat (weighted down with ESPN gold bars) through treacherous, Category-Five-level-hurricane headwinds in what has easily been the craziest presidential campaign in the modern political era.

Hey, everyone – can you please not do a victory dance over this article? I would like to reduce this kind of comparison. You all know what he has done to create this activity in the public eye. He’s a pioneer.

I told you in 2012 that i was done with Silver
when he disappeared the NYT piece he wrote debunking the dem oversampling myth.
That was pure unadulterated pandering.
Scientists and mathematicians have a deep responsibility to the public good….to not whore themselves out for clicks and eyeballs.
That is why transparency of poll aggregation models is so important.